A recent article in BYU Studies called attention to two clear trends in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States. The first is that members are succeeding in many ways — we pray more, attend church more and report being happier than most other Americans.

The other trend is that markedly fewer people are staying in the church. We’re keeping about half, which is a big drop from what it used to be. We kept about 8 in 10 childhood members back in the 1980s.

And the biggest bombshell? Women are now more likely to leave than men, especially if they’re younger.

Consider Ryan Burge’s 2025 Spiritual Seismology Survey, with an overall sample size of 100,741 U.S. adults, including 1,177 who were raised as Latter-day Saints. It found that about 4 in 10 Generation Z women who grew up as Latter-day Saints are still in the church. For the very youngest 18-year-old Latter-day Saint women, the retention rate was 37.5%.

Pew’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study shows a similar general trend, though it’s less dire. Two-thirds of women over age 50 have stayed members, compared to just under half of younger ones. That’s a retention difference of 17 points.

Why is this happening? Based on Benjamin Knoll’s and my research for the forthcoming book “Leaving Mormonism: Who Is Exiting The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—and Why,” I have some ideas. Let’s boil them down to “three P’s”: young women are reacting against politics, purity culture and powerlessness.

Young women are more liberal, and liberals are more likely to leave religion

Recent U.S. surveys have shown that young women are growing more liberal than men their age. Gallup helpfully breaks this out over time: 20 years ago, there was only a 3 percentage point gap in young women who leaned left (28%) compared to young men (25%). That has now widened to 15 points (40% vs 25%). PRRI and Change Research have also found Gen Z women to be one of the most liberal demographic groups in America.

Why does this matter for Latter-day Saint retention?

It matters because politics is now driving religious affiliation and disaffiliation in America. In the past 50 years, religious conservatives have aligned with the Republican Party, and religious “nones” have gravitated toward the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, our political identities have become more important over time in how we define ourselves — for many people, more so than religion.

Taking these developments together, it can be lonely and painful to be liberal in a conservative church, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

This discomfort is especially acute for young women, because some of the political issues the Utah-based faith has publicly combated are the same ones young women are likely to support.

Gen Z women lead all demographic groups in wanting full equality for LGBTQ+ people under the law, whereas the church mounted a massive political effort to defeat same-sex marriage when these women were kids.

Gen Z women want equal rights for women, whereas the church publicly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment not only in the 1970s but as recently as 2019-2020.

They want legal access to abortion, which the church opposes except in relatively rare instances.

Young women are reacting against the extreme “purity culture” of the early 2000s

Related to their generally liberal views on gender and sexuality, today’s disaffiliation may be a backlash against the extreme sexual “purity culture” that was taught when many young Latter-day Saint women were teens.

One study tracked the church’s guidance on modest dress through its official magazines. Up through the 1990s, the church taught teens and adults of both genders to dress modestly and take care of their bodies. In the early 21st century, though, the targeted warnings to teenage girls went through the roof. Girls 20 years ago were hearing about the dangers of immodest dress about six times as often as boys in church magazines. Paradigmatic of this era, then-apostle Dallin Oaks, now the church president, warned girls specifically in 2005 that if they dressed immodestly, they were “becoming pornography” to men.

This focus caused anxiety for young Latter-day Saint women I’ve interviewed. For Nicole, a 23-year-old woman, the church’s constant policing of her body and her thoughts meant that she “learned how to avoid feeling sexual” as a teen. She just shut it down. At the time of our interview, she had been out of the church for two years but was still deeply uncomfortable with her own sexuality. She identified purity culture as one of the most damaging aspects of growing up a Latter-day Saint and part of why she left the church. She is not alone in this.

Young women now have equal power in almost every arena of their lives — except at church

Finally, there’s a growing disconnect between the power young women experience now in most aspects of their lives compared to the powerlessness many report feeling at church. In the church, women cannot hold the priesthood, bless or pass the sacrament, baptize a convert or make policy decisions. (And, no, please don’t try to tell me that because teen girls get to plan some of their weeknight activities, this makes them “equal.”)

In earlier generations, barring women from leadership was par for the course in larger society, so the church was hardly an outlier. Gender inequality was the norm in America. But for the rising generation — schooled in the girl power movement and promised they could do anything — it feels like a slap.

The church has made some strides in recent years. In 2025, it finally began allowing women to serve missions at the same age men can and debuted sleeveless temple garments for women in the U.S. I suspect both changes are quiet attempts to stem the loss of so many female members. Time will tell whether such changes help.

Because in a church that does not permit women to help create the policy decisions that affect them, some feel there’s only one way to be heard: voting with their feet.

Note to readers • The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.